Viking

This is a massive book: 506 pages of text; eighty-nine pages of references and bibliography; seventeen maps, all of them full page or more; and forty-two illustrations. It is also an important book, and it is easy for the reader to follow Nick Lloyd’s argument. The Eastern Front is a major corrective to how most readers here and in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States understand the Great War, as it was once called.

In Gabriel García Márquez’s most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Colonel Aureliano Buendía twice requests that his poetry be destroyed – first when he is in prison, preparing to face the firing squad. He hands his mother a roll of sweat-stained poems and instructs her to burn them. ‘Promise me that no one will read them,’ he says. His mother promises, but does not burn the poems. Years later, as a different family member is about to light the oven, the colonel hands her the same roll of yellowed papers. ‘Light it with this,’ he says. When she refuses, the colonel feeds the poems to the fire himself.

That doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill is something their patients might say, and about as useless as declaring that dentists are forbidden from contracting toothache or that undertakers should live forever – seeing other people out, not themselves.

Sean Turnell is an Australian economist who was detained by Myanmar’s military regime from February 2021 until November 2022. An Unlikely Prisoner, his account of the ordeal, has quite a personal tone as he relates his struggle with unjust imprisonment by a regime whose hallmark was ‘a mix of the needlessly brutal, the petty, and the incompetent’. This personal story is also mixed with politics, for Turnell has an insider’s view of Myanmar’s ongoing struggle for freedom, one of the great dramas of modern Asian history.

Sometimes, for the faithful, it doesn’t do to look too closely into the life of your chosen idol. Saul of Tarsus had been an enthusiastic persecutor of Christians before his spiritual detour en route to Damascus. St Camillus de Lellis, patron saint of nurses and the sick, to whom we owe the symbol of the red cross, spent his early life as a con man, a mercenary, and a compulsive gambler – little wonder he went far in the Church. Where our secular martyrs are concerned, matters become still murkier. Mahatma Gandhi tested his chastity by sleeping naked with nubile young women and girls – one of whom was his grand-niece. And as for Julian Assange ...

The life of a spy is based on lies, but both these books make an attempt to separate fact from fiction in the stories of their subjects. 

A lot can change in a few years. In March 2020, on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic, I wrote a review essay for ABR about the proliferation of trans and gender diverse (TGD) life writing. Back then, the most notable examples came from overseas, and – with the exception of established names like ABC’s Eddie Ayres (now Ed Le Broq), author of the 2017 memoir Danger Music – major Australian publishers had yet to take a chance on local trans voices.

This is a book about rage, as Chrissie Foster says in her opening sentence. It is motivated and driven by rage and, if this is not an oxymoron, it is a panegyric to rage.

Was he John or was he David? That’s the trouble with being a literary double agent: there’s always the significant other to consider. David Cornwell, alias John le Carré, devised his pseudonym in 1958, on the same day he also created his most famous character, George Smiley, on the opening page of his first novel, Call for the Dead. This was when le Carré – a fresh recruit to MI5 and on his daily two-hour train commute into central London – ‘just began writing in a little notebook’.

There, at the back of Louis Édouard Fournier’s painting The Funeral of Shelley (1889), you can almost see him. One of the mourners to the right of Lord Byron is a tall man with light hair: one Cashel Greville Ross (1799–1882), the hero of William Boyd’s new novel, The Romantic. But Fournier’s depiction of Shelley’s cremation was a fabrication. The kneeling woman at the left, Mary Shelley, wasn’t in attendance, and neither was Cashel – for he didn’t exist.